Our prayer for peace grows from memory and place, from seeds planted in limestone and sandstone,
roots in a crater in the Negev desert,
buds in a city under the Mediterranean Sea, and
leaves in our Torah stories and our histories.
Our prayer for peace branches out from our encounters with the Nabbateans and Babylonians,
the Greeks and Romans, Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians, with each other and
with everyone and everything the Land remembers.
We are standing where the old and the new touch and we have so many feelings.
We are sad, worried, anxious, proud, hopeful, and scared.
We have feelings we can name and feelings we can’t identify, and
often we don’t even know how to feel.
We always know we care.
There is room for all of our feelings in our prayers for peace
and in our prayers for enough of everything for everyone.
No exceptions.Â
Barukh atah Adonai, who protects and keeps us and all of the memories and all of the stories,
who helps us remember, and who helps us feel all of our feelings and express them safely.
May the future bloom with shared laughter and the Peace we make Together.Â
Last but not least:
Amen.
A Word About this Prayer
I wrote this prayer collaboratively with folks in Merchav Shabbat.
The youngest was about 10 years old and the oldest is a grandparent.
Many of the younger participants had devoted two weeks over a summer learning about Israel with me.
That learning shows up in the language they chose and the places and peoples they referenced.
We can really hear the kids in the ending, “last but not least.”
On Shabbat we talked about the prayer our hearts needed right then and started shaping some words.
Over the next two months when we prayed for peace we prayed with some of the words we had already written and some spontaneously. A community prayer evolved.
I took the phrases and images and concepts and crafted them into this current form.
